Getting started with OpenCV

[Eric Gregori] sent in an article he wrote for EETimes to introduce the concepts behind computer vision to the masses. As a nice little bonus, [Eric] included a VMware image containing Ubuntu and all the packages and examples necessary to write your own OpenCV apps.

Included in [Eric]’s VM image are a motion and line detection example app, an ‘optical flow’ example, and a face detection example. There’s enough here to make a few very interesting projects, so hopefully, [Eric]’s VM image and examples will get your next CV project up and running quickly.

I spent several evenings getting OpenCV 2.4 + the videoInput lib working for x64 windows just to be able to enumerate the camera devices. I think a feature request has been issued.
Coming up next: distortion correction and stitching.

You can build it for x64 if you manage to obtain/build the dependencies for x64 (things have changed since the last version of videoInput I was able to find, the platform SDK is called “Windows SDK” and the DirectDraw stuff is now part of the DirectX SDK). In this case, the DirectDraw base classes needed rebuilding.
Once all include and additional library paths are set properly, it works.
There are other problems (you’ll have to exclude some standard libraries via additional commandline statements etc.) which I won’t go into detail here.

The first dandelion “rescue” system I imagined resulted in smoking craters instead of yellow flowers. I think the flowers are preferable. XD

Honestly, I’ve always been of the mind that large, weed-free, grass lawns are a waste of space, water and chemicals. Unless you have kids who need play space or animals to graze, and neither of those mind the occasional dandelion.